While not trying to ban killer robots or drill tunnels under Los Angeles, Elon Musk has been busying himself with SpaceX, the space exploration start-up that ultimately wants to shoot humans up to Mars. Speaking at the International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide, Australia, on Friday, Musk once again announced that SpaceX’s long-awaited crewed trip to Mars is just around the corner. In five years, Musk wants to send cargo ships to Mars; two years later, in 2024, he wants humans to be making those trips, with an eventual goal of colonizing Mars.

SpaceX, Musk said, will start building the necessary rockets for the Mars mission next year. SpaceX will pivot from its current rocket configurations—the Falcon 9, the Falcon Heavy, and the Dragon spacecraft—and will focus on just one kind of vehicle. The B.F.R. (shorthand for Big Fucking Rocket) will do all of SpaceX’s interplanetary travel in the future. Consolidating to one kind of rocket will help make SpaceX’s space travel more affordable; Musk says he hopes to start building the rocket in the coming six to nine months. The new rocket, Musk said Friday, will also be used to land on the moon and return to Earth. Not only will the B.F.R. be responsible for interplanetary travel and for launching satellites, but, Musk announced, it could also be used for “point-to-point” travel on Earth. “Most long-distance trips,” Musk said, could be completed using the rocket in half an hour. People could travel “anywhere on Earth in under an hour” for the same price as a plane ticket. A trip from Los Angeles to New York could take as little as 25 minutes using the B.F.R., which Musk interchangeably calls the Interplanetary Transport System. The reusable mega-rocket would be used to lift a spaceship into orbit around the Earth, and then land on floating landing pads close to major cities.

Musk is known for his optimistic timelines for SpaceX projects, last year announcing that he planned to send an unmanned rocket to the Red Planet “as soon as 2018.” His company, which is working with NASA to carry astronauts to the International Space Station, has already taken significant deposits from private citizens for a trip around the moon on the Falcon Heavy. But they may want to wait until some bugs are ironed out. Last fall, days before a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket was scheduled to bring Facebook’s first satellite to orbit, the rocket exploded during a pre-launch test on a launch pad in Cape Canaveral.